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WHEN A CHORUS LINE WAS STARTING OUT By Peter Filichia

WHEN A CHORUS LINE WAS STARTING OUT By Peter Filichia “Remember the first time you saw A Chorus Line?” So went a television commercial that aired around 1983, a little more than halfway through the show’s then-record 6,137-performance Broadway run. Now I’ll ask you “Remember the first time you heard A Chorus Line?” For some of […]

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Raisin’ Some Memories of Raisin By Peter Filichia

Raisin’ Some Memories of Raisin By Peter Filichia Funny thing; soon after I’d watched the film 42 — which details Jackie Robinson’s historic journey in becoming become baseball’s first black player and superstar — I realized that that number was about to be relevant to African-American history once again. Raisin – the musical version of […]

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Clearing Up Clear Day by Peter Filichia

By Peter Filichia It was the first musical to be denied a Best Musical Tony nomination and yet win the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. Until Aida in 2000, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever was the only show to hold that distinction. Bookwriter-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane had […]

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The Rothschilds’ Rich Score by Peter Filichia

By Peter Filichia For me, one of the great nights of the 2015-2016 season will take place when I saunter into the tiny York Theatre Company that’s nestled in the bowels of the Citicorp Building. Sherman Yellen and Sheldon Harnick have reconceived their 1970 musical The Rothschilds and have turned it into a 90-minute musical […]

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DAMES AT SEA Sails to Broadway by Peter Filichia

By Peter Filichia “As a very young man,” says John Bolton, “I’d already decided that I just had to have every original cast album that had ever been made.” Well, which of us can’t relate to that? So at one point in the ‘70s, the Rochester, New York native went into his local record store […]

Peter Filichia is the theater critic emeritus for the Star-Ledger in Newark, New Jersey and News 12 New Jersey.

He is a columnist each Friday for www.mtishows.com and www.kritzerland.com.

Filichia is the author of Let’s Put on a Musical, now in its third printing; Broadway Musicals: The Biggest Hit of the Season / The Biggest Flop of the Season and Broadway Musical MVPs 1960-2010: The Most Valuable Players of the Last 50 Seasons. His new book, Strippers, Showgirls, and Sharks will be published in May, 2013 by St. Martin’s Press.

He has been a columnist for Playbill, Theater.com, Theatermania and Theater Week.

Before joining the Theatre World Awards in 1996 as host and head of the selection committee, Filichia served four terms as president of the Drama Desk. He has served on an assessment panel for the National Endowment for the Arts, and is currently critic-in-residence for the University of Cincinnati-Conservatory of Music and the musical theater judge for the ASCAP Awards program.